Hey, all the cool kids are doing it. With Andrew Osborne posting his favorite films of the first six months of 2008 last week, and Paul Clark doing the same only yesterday, who am I to drop the ball? This list, already heavily revised just since last week thanks to some illuminating July 4th viewing, will no doubt undergo serious revision before anything on it makes it to a Best of 2008 list; living in a city where first-run movies are hard to come by unless they're American and released by a mainstream production company, I've come to reply quite heavly on home video releases, film festivals, and other avenues of distribution that make assessments of this sort quite difficult so early in the year. That said, here's what's flicked my switches so far in a year that follows one of the best in recent memory.
My top five:
1. WALL*E - They say that the studio system is dead, and that the releasing company no longer tells you anything about the quality of the film. That's true to an extent, but Pixar is a glorious exception to the rule. The computer animation studio has hardly released a single film during its entire existence, and their latest, concerning a robot whose job is to clean up the detritus of a dead world, has raised the wrath of conservatives while managing to be perhaps the greatest movie Pixar has yet made. Especially daring because it largely abandons the clever dialogue of previous releases, it instead gives the eyes a feast like they've never seen before throughout its long periods of silence. An astonishingly successful film with heart, spirit and intelligence, proving that great art can be commercial. Or vice versa.
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